WITH HIS WALRUS moustache and the ever-smouldering Meerschaum, Günter Grass has the classic looks of an old-school public intellectual. For the past 40 years it’s a part he has played happily, and sometimes with nauseating gusto – passing down his moral verdict on anything from candidates for Chancellor in his native Germany to Danish cartoons.

The louder the cries of outrage, then, when last August Grass admitted in an interview before the publication of this memoir in Germany that he had served as a member of the Waffen SS for the final months of the Second World War.

As with, say, Martin Amis, people often feel entitled to have an opinion about Grass before they have read him. So it’s worth setting a few things straight about Peeling the Onion. For a start, there is nothing accidental about its “scandal”. Grass doesn’t just let slip about his Waffen SS membership – in fact, he makes quite a show of it. “I could have been labelled a Young Nazi,” he writes at one point, “but I can take care of the labelling and branding myself.”

And so he does, building up suspense in masterly fashion as he peels away the layers of his memory. In the end it becomes clear that the core of the onion is not so rotten at all: the 17-year-old Grass never pulls the trigger of his machine-gun. He is a fool, not a murderer. If this had been David Beckham’s autobiography, we would have called all the fuss a PR stunt. But why would Germany’s old man of letters need publicity?

It’s worth remembering that by last August things had started to go quiet around the Nobel 1999 prizewinner. With the 2006 World Cup, Germany had moved on from the guilt-ridden self-analysis represented in his novels. The saviour of German-Polish relations was not the Danzig-born Grass but Germany’s Polish-born striker Lukas Podolski, who was not born when The Tin Drum was published. The Grass brand was in danger of of losing touch with young Germany.

As a moral arbitrator on political issues, Grass might well have lost his appeal for ever. But as a writer, his influence still looms large, and Peeling the Onion is a reminder why. It has that same imaginative accuracy that made The Tin Drum a bestseller: the Boy Scout who knows more about British than German warships because his father secretly listens to enemy radio. The blue-eyed Aryan giant in the SS who refuses to touch a gun. Grass’s jape-loving mother, who replaces her son’s rye bread with a bar of soap when she finds him lost in books. All these are rich characters that live on away from the page.

The emotional heart of the memoir lies in a chapter that describes how young Günter is trained as a cook in a prisoner-of-war camp. Ingredients are scarce, but the master chef, a “curly-haired greybeard” recently demoted from gunner to goulash-cannon, is an inventive character: he teaches cooking by evocation, using his words to spice up his meals.

Grass is quick to learn: “The more my stomach shrank, the more my imagination grew.” That power of evocation is still his greatest gift: my mouth was watering as I turned the pages. The onion of the book’s title is more than just a laboured metaphor for the multi-layeredness of memory. It is also a reminder that Grass’s prose draws its life from the kitchen.

Peeling the Onion takes us up to the writer’s early thirties. It ends in 1959, with the publication of The Tin Drum. Up to that point, it showed me a Günter Grass whom, to my own surprise, I rather liked: a cheeky, priapic youngster with a hunger for life and a huge appetite for tobacco, late-night jazz and girls. Politics – his main arena of the later years – are not to his taste then: in fact, “anything that smacked of politics I rejected out of hand”. It makes you wonder if all the outrage about the Waffen SS chapters misses the point: perhaps the scandal is not what happened to Grass before 1945, but what happened to him after 1959.

Harvill Secker, £18.99; 432pp

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A German Master

THE TIN DRUM (1959) The first book in the Danzig Trilogy: Oskar Matzerath refuses to grow up and makes war-crazy Germans dance to his beat.

THE FLOUNDER (1978) A history of warring between the sexes, spun off from a fairytale about a fisherman and his wife.

SELECTED POEMS: 1956-93 (1999) With the poem-cum-recipe Jellied Pig’s Head: “Take a pig’s head, add a spoonful of medium rage.”

MY CENTURY (1999) 100 narrators zigzag through the 20th century, from the fall of the Kaiserreich to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

CRABWALK (2002) The story of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German refugee boat torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in the Baltic, revisited 60 years on.

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